Monday, October 14, 2013

Page 284

--donation bonus (day #11, post 5/5)--
‘Okay, just tell me where you are first,’ said Garovel.

‘I don’t really, uh... I think I went south...’

‘You gotta give me more to go on, Hector.’

‘I’ll... I’ll make you a guidepost.’

‘What do you mean?’

Hector stretched his arms. He took a hard breath and rubbed his hands together. ‘Fly up high and look south.’

‘Er, okay...’

He placed both hands against the ground. A metal beam exploded out of the ground in front of him. He continuously added to it, wider and wider layers at its base, and soon, he had created the tallest needle he’d ever seen. ‘Do you see it?’

‘Um. See what?’

Hector furrowed his brow. He took a step back and added even more. It shot up into the sky, becoming a tower.

‘Holy shit,’ said Garovel. ‘You didn’t just... Did you really just make that gigantic needle there?’

‘Yeah...’

‘Oh, wow... I’m on my way. Now what the hell happened?’

Hector still wasn’t sure where to begin. He closed his eyes and tried to think. ‘The cellphone,’ he thought. ‘The text messages... they were a trap. By Geoffrey.’

‘Not sure I understand...’

Hector elaborated at length. He told the reaper everything. He fumbled over the worst parts. His father. Nathan. Micah. At least a dozen students. His throat swelled up as he talked further. He was practically choking by the end.

And Garovel listened patiently to it all. Perhaps too patiently. The reaper hardly said anything. His skeletal face spoke of abject horror. Evening arrived by the time Garovel spoke again. ‘How could...? I was only gone for three hours... three-and-a-half, at the most...’

Hector leaned against a tall rock and rubbed his swollen eyes. “What do we do now, Garovel? I’m just... I’m so fucking lost...”

For a long while, Garovel had no answer to that. But then he said something that made Hector stare. ‘...Who still needs you?’

The way I see it is more of a downside to the medium. We really have no frame of reference for the passage of time in these kinds of stories (which is why there will be some kind of joke about this in some stories). The best we can do is just to try to keep track of some events:

Garovel left sometime early in the morning shortly prior to Hector going to school. As soon as school starts, a battle breaks out between Hector and Geoffrey, and the intensity of the battle causes the pace of the story to slow down accordingly. We actually have no idea how long the battle lasts, but due to the conversation between Hector and Garovel, we know that Garovel arrived before the sun set (yet after a police chase). So if not for him explicitly saying 3 hours, we could deduce anything from a couple hours to somewhere around 10, unless Frost actually gave us some kind of clue to the time, such as a chiming clock, etc.RD